KCET Features Cut Chemist in Venice Beach

KCET has a new “Artbound” series named “Hear and Now”. “Hear and Now” will place Southern California musicians in the locations that inspired a song and document a performance of the song, in that place. First up is DJ Cut Chemist with a citywide “mix tape”

Cut Chemist’s “Outro” is staged on Ocean Front Walk (4:50 in the video). Here is what he had to say to KCET about his composition and Venice:

“Outro” is my own composition. I thought it was fun to not really sneak that in there, ’cause you can’t really sneak “Outro” anywhere. It just comes in like a bat out of hell. Especially coming out of that jazzy, hypnotic vibe of Ethiopian music, then you’re hit with raw American, naughty punk.
Where did the beats in “Outro” come from?

It’s a sample base and it comes from a few things, a drummer named Anthony Park who plays for Mars Volta, doing the drumming behind a composition of drum programming I’m doing. The bass is played by Lonnie Marshall who is part of an L.A. group called Weapon of Choice. The rapper is named Blackbird. He’s an L.A. emcee, vocalist, artist. The guitar sample comes from a group, the song that they did is kind of punk, called Fine Art and they’re from Minnesota. The song is called “Big Kids in the Alley,” where I chopped up that guitar to mix it. It’s kind of an industrial, slam it, jam it, punk-rap song. It’s my latest single so I thought I’d be nice to pub that and terrorize the boardwalk of Venice Beach with it.

How does it connect with Venice?

Venice Beach is a home for a lot of artistic endeavors. You see a lot of artists playing, painting, skating – there’s a lot of energy and a lot stimulation there. Always has been. “Outro” seemes to be the best fit for that kind of energy. For me, I just see Venice boardwalk as just a frazzled kind of, over-stimulated. It’s just moving so fast. I always envisioned “Outro” being closely tied with skate culture, to the movement. Initially we wanted to do it at a skate park but we thought the boardwalk would be a little more suitable.
Setting up on the Venice boardwalk was kind of insane. That was our most guerilla session.

The set up had to be done so quickly to not disrupt the vibe of the boardwalk. I’m not even sure it can be disrupted because it seems like that’s what makes Venice boardwalk, Venice boardwalk. It is seemingly disrupted with things going on here, there. I think we set up in record timing except the whole sound system we broke it down in five minutes.

The funniest thing is we went there set up gigantic speakers and we’re playing super loud music and very few people turned around. It felt like it was just a part of everything there, in a sense.

Yeah, That goes back to what I was talking about where its big city life, anything can happen anywhere. Everybody is braced for that possibility, so it doesn’t even really affect them. At a place like Venice Beach, where anything and everything will happen, I think people are almost immune. It’s like the crowd that’s there is as punk rock as “Outro” is, you know, because they’re like, “So what? We get this all the time.”

Yo! Venice! was started by two friends, Keri and Bret, to create a communal blog for residents of Venice Beach California.
In today’s world of RSS feeds, they felt that a blog would be a perfect place for people to let others know how they view the Venice Beach community through words and pictures. It is hoped that this site will become a communal blog with many people submitting stories for all in the community to share.